#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #US #ANARCHISM #LIBRARY #News #Journal #Update - (en) #US, black rose fed BRRN: Statement: Not One More Tyre Nichols (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 The following statement is endorsed by the membership of Black Rose Anarchist

Federation / Federación Anarquista Rosa Negra. ---- On January 10, 2023, Tyre
Nichols died from severe physical injuries, including a broken neck, sustained
three days earlier at the hands, batons, pepper spray, and tasers of five
Memphis, Tennessee police officers. As one of the lawyers for Tyre's family
described it, Officers Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin III,
Desmond Mills Jr, and Justin Smith treated him like "a human piñata" during a
January 7 confrontation. ---- Tyre Deandre Nichols was born on June 5, 1993, in
Sacramento, California. He was two years old when Stephon Clark was born at a
nearby hospital. The two lived near each other for the entirety of Stephon's
short life; Tyre left for Memphis shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic. These
young fathers would face similar fates less than four years apart from each
other: death at the hands of municipal police officers. Whereas Stephon died by
gunshot, Tyre suffered what his city's police chief described as "perhaps worse"
than the Los Angeles Police Department's infamous beating of Rodney King -
another Sacramento, CA native - nearly seventeen years to the day preceding
Stephon's death.

Nine months before he was murdered, Tyre joined 30,000 coworkers at FedEx, one of
Memphis's leading employers. He started working there eight years after fellow
workers at one of his employer's top national competitors, United Parcel Service,
refused to ship law enforcement equipment to Missouri in solidarity with the
nationwide uprising against police brutality after Michael Brown was gunned down
in Ferguson.

After police murders like these, widespread protests, die-ins, riots, and other
street actions often take the nation to demand justice for the slain. These
uprisings express - and generate - collective anger, antipathy, and opposition to
the most discrete instances of racist state violence. Recently, these protests
have raised the calls to defund, disarm, and dismantle their police departments
and find alternative social service and safety systems. All the while, mainstream
liberal talking heads proclaim "a moment of racial reckoning" that may finally
curb the next Rodney. The next Michael. The next Stephon. The next Breonna. The
next George.

Members of Black Rose / Rosa Negra join a demonstration in Oakland, CA after Tyre
Nichols' murder.
And still, the next Tyre loses his life as budgets for police departments grow
across the country after the political elite's foremost leaders call for more
money to hire more and "retrain" existing law enforcement officers. He becomes
the next in a long line of people murdered by police: in 2022, these agents of
the state killed a record-setting 1,186 people, over a quarter of which were
Black - twice their share of the US population.

Thus, concrete experiences, from the long, hot summer of 1967 to the 1992 LA
riots to the 2020 George Floyd rebellion, show that these righteous, empowering
popular upswells tend to momentarily flare before dissipating from and being
co-opted and repressed off the streets with neither the systemic transformation
so many desperately crave nor the sustained organization needed to build power to
bring it into reality.

Since recordings of the officers brutally arresting Tyre were released Friday
evening, minimal street actions have materialized in Memphis and elsewhere. State
administrators and politicians may have learned lessons from 2020's George Floyd
rebellion that helped curb collective discontent so far. Local city council
members proclaimed they wanted to "send a very strong message" that "misconduct"
would face reproach when they fired two EMTs who responded to Tyre, following the
firing of the five officers. Similarly, Memphis Police Raines Precinct Commander
Colonel Dennis McNeil "personally apologize[d]" for his officers' actions,
claiming they were "not indicative of the entire police department." Even the
head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation - the same institution that
surveilled and harrassed movements and individual activists for years, including
Martin Luther King, Jr., and declared Black Lives Matter a movement of "Black
Identity Extremists" - claimed he was "appalled" with the five Memphis officers'
behavior upon opening an investigation into their actions. Alongside public
denouncements and workplace removals, the Shelby County District Attorney charged
the officers with a litany of crimes, including second-degree murder, before
Friday's footage release. Typical public demands for minimal accountability seem
to have been heeded early and effectively before people across the country had
the time to absorb another digitally-recorded lynching.
Pic:
Fired and/or indicted Memphis police officers involved in Tyre Nichols' murder

Whether or not masses of people rise in revolt, the systems that sprout racist
state violence will likely stay in place, reinforced and re-legitimated in new
ways. How, then, might we dismantle these interlocking systems of domination that
disproportionately maim, murder, and cage Black people? How do we transcend the
cycle of police brutality -> street demonstrations -> promises of
"accountability," "healing," and "change" -> movement demobilization -> state
entrenchment?

Movement activists in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Atlanta, Georgia offer some lessons.

After Derek Chauvin squeezed the life out of George Floyd, Minneapolis's eruption
was best emblematized with the immolation of the Third Precinct police
headquarters. Although the building's barren shell symbolizes the city council's
lack of institutional progress to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department
promised in the throes of the uprising, neighborhood-based organizational
structures became important prefigurations of a world without police.

When stores burned and white supremacists menaced residents in the uprising's
early days, local organizers helped coordinate block-by-block organizing to
defend their communities and continue access to food, baby supplies, and other
necessities. Neighbors exchanged phone numbers and email addresses, created lists
of resources they could share between themselves, and helped meet each other's
needs. These organizing structures also spurred cross-neighborhood working groups
like an "ad hoc fire squad" composed of community members that would quickly
respond to nearby emergencies. Although these kinds of organizations have ebbed
like the rebellion, many of their participants involved themselves and their
neighbors in citywide campaigns to transform policing that have won significant -
but not electorally significant - support.

In Georgia, a coalition of environmental, anti-carceral, and other community
activists have coalesced with local residents for the last two years to stop
Atlanta authorities from replacing a section of the Weelanuee Forest with a
multimillion dollar police training facility christened "Cop City." Such efforts
aim to not only preserve the natural environment and a rich ecosystem but also to
prevent state forces from further encroaching into - and possibly taking more of
- their lives. Since 2013, state agents in the city have killed forty-eight
people, three out of every four of whom were Black.

Although the state has launched a campaign of fear and intimidation against them
by murdering campaign participant Manuel "Tortuguita" Paez Teran and slamming
over a dozen activists with trumped-up "domestic terrorism" charges, movement
organizers have answered the repression they've faced with escalating tactics.
 From hosting public demonstrations downtown to encouraging community members to
flood city council comments denouncing its plans to targeted property destruction
and living in makeshift treetop shelters that inhibit heavy machinery from
knocking them down, the campaign shows few signs of slowing. Calls to "Stop Cop
City" and "Defend the Atlanta Forest" have spread as far and quickly as the
movement's hashtags: over 2,000 organizations and individuals from around the
world have signed the movement's statement of solidarity, along with call-in
campaigns to demand the project's investors to pull their funding from it.

Atlanta's forest defenders make clear that it is entirely possible to slow - and
even push back - the seemingly ever-expanding arms of the state, and
Minneapolis's block-by-block organizing envisioned, if momentarily, how a
cop-free and more communal world could be made. Both target earlier stages in the
precipitating chain that culminates in police brutality: Atlanta at the heart of
the state's repressive expansion, Minneapolis at the intervening period when
authorities might be called to "restore order." And both demonstrate that systems
of domination will not be toppled in one or even several explosive event(s), but
require strategic, sustained, and responsive tactics and visions by many people
to make long-term impacts.

However masses of people respond to published video of Tyre's murder, stopping
future ones requires ongoing organizing for popular power that can defend
against, offensively strike, and ultimately supplant these systems from the
ground-up. To do so, we must bring our full selves that we momentarily become in
the streets - with our disgust and disdain for the systems and purveyors of
violence, the joy and jubilance for a different world, and everything in between
- back to the places where we live, work, play, and care, in our day-to-day lives.

In memory of Tyre Nichols and all others lost, in struggle with all who remain.

Black Rose Anarchist Federation / Federación Anarquista Rosa Negra

https://blackrosefed.org/statement-not-one-more-tyre-nichols/
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